A viewer asks: “High blood pressure is conventionally regarded as a health risk and that lowering it reduces risk, especially in moderate-to-severe systolic BP of 140-159 mmHg. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick author of Doctoring Data claims that cardiovascular risk increases more steeply after systolic BP reaches around 160-170 mmHg—well beyond the 140/90 threshold often used to diagnose and treat hypertension. A rule of thumb in medicine is that for older individuals, a systolic BP of around 100 + age is a reasonable upper limit beyond which cardiovascular risks increase significantly. Is hypertension over-treated, given that aggressively lowering blood pressure—especially in older individuals—can be harmful?”

This is very much the case. It is a classic example of a managed deception embracing a correlation as a causal influence at work when it is not truly so. In other words, mild hypertension is experienced in people with mild heart risk and severe hypertension is experienced in people with severe heart risk, but blood pressure is not causing heart attacks or heart failure. Hypertension is an accompanying symptom that is viewed as the central problem when it is simply not, and treating hypertension will not be the life-saving measure it is believed to represent. We have pointed out before that while it is true that extremely high blood pressure can unduly strain the heart muscle and trigger a heart attack, it is the weakness of that muscle representing an upper boundary on performance that leads to an infarction. When an extreme episode is underway, medication to lower the blood pressure can be life-saving in the moment. But treating everyone according to arbitrary cutoffs and acceptable ranges of blood pressure is medically unimportant and carries significant risk in terms of liability from the inherent toxic nature of synthetic chemicals taken into the body.